Vampires and Bieber and bears, oh my!

I’d like to think that a newspaper’s book room offers a small window onto the American mind.

After a week of vacation, I returned to neat stacks of soon-to-be released books awaiting my perusal. It’s a dirty affair, sorting through new titles and deciding what to review, what to ignore and what to think about later. You’re always worried about the books you’ve cast aside.

But today, in the interest of faux science, I sorted through 106 books — there are another 100 that still need to be unpacked from the cardboard boxes they came in — to see which genres and topics are flooding the market.

Call it an impromptu case study.

If nothing else, new titles offer a sampling of America’s reading appetite. And what I concluded from the Chronicle’s pile is that we’re more interested in fiction than fact, we love a good mystery and it’s never too soon to think about Christmas.

Here’s what I found:

30 novels, including two translated from Portuguese and Getting to Happy, Terry McMillan’s sequel to Waiting to Exhale